Contemporary radar systems are usually equipped with receivers which are mostly of the heterodyne type with digital signal conversion. A very high degree of receiver linearity is often required, for example, for VHF SAR, (Synthetic Aperture Radar) which is a suitable application of the present invention.
In heterodyne receiver such as those often used in contemporary radar systems, linearity is traded for complex filter or transfer characteristics, implying a complex side lobe pattern if data is windowed by a duty cycle or spectrally for stepped frequency modes. Typically, the side lobes cannot be predicted, and will even vary from one receiver individual to another. The side lobes will also change with temperature or component aging, and will thus require constant calibration efforts.